It has been a hectic couple weeks since we returned from out west; catch-up sure can be a killer. Either way, I'm not letting my overly-tired ass stay put tonight, tomorrow, or Friday, as Toronto becomes ground zero for some of the most exciting conversation in online news, citizen journalism, and media democracy.

Thanks to Lisa Rundle, I've got ring-side seats for what is sure to be one of the week's more exciting events: CBC's The Future of the Future of News forum. Sparks are sure to fly when Andrew Keen and Leonard Brody go head-to-head on the topic of citizen journalism. Andrew is the author of The Cult of the Amateur -- a book that refuses to accept that the Web is changing the rules -- and Leonard is the founder of Now Public, a Vancouver-based citizen journalism start-up that is catching mainstream attention.

On Thursday and Friday, the Online News Association is holding their 2007 conference here in Toronto at the Sheraton. Both days are jammed with exciting sessions, all being delivered by people that I've been anxious to connect with. It would be hard to get more impressive folks in a room -- everyone from the Washington Post's interactive team (like Adrian Holovaty talking about "The Cutting Edge of Online Data"), to Jay Rosen, Dan Gilmour, and Slashdot's Robin "Roblimo" Miller. I'm not one for autographs... but, hey, why not?

And, If I can skip out of work this afternoon, the ONA is hosting a seminar with recent winners of the Knight News Challenge. No autographs necessary -- just a copy of your winning proposal, please. ;-) Seriously though, my fingers are crossed this year for two organizations that I've been lucky enough to work with -- The Tyee and rabble.ca -- who both submitted applications in the most recent round.

So, if you don't see me at the Jet Fuel this Saturday, you'll know it's because I'm either recovering or working all weekend!

The tools that are available for combining images, audio, and text have just become too easy to use for publications to ignore. Many magazines are already doing the work of recording interviews, shooting photographs, and building out a theme for their editorial packages. So the question is: what are the opportunities to leverage these simple tools to bring a story to life online?

Even though recent studies are showing that people read more, and more deeply, online than in print, there's a growing trend across Web publications to add multi-media storytelling to the mix. From the audio-only podcast -- like the rabble's podcast network -- to the Flash-enabled experiences that are starting to be commonplace on most large news sites, everyone has finally figured out that people want more than just text.

Given that I've already touched on podcasting, I wanted to share what online publications were up to around multi-media experiences; and how hard (or easy!) it would be for more publications to put these tools to use.

Great examples are everywhere. I spent hours just exploring the 2007 Web site winners of the National Press Photographers Association's "Best of Photojournalism 2007." The diversity of the winning sites is impressive: everything from San Jose Mercury News Photography Department's archive, to simple Flickr slideshows and blogs.

How easy is it to create an photo slideshow? Or even a narrated slideshow? Really easy.

Though there are lots of tools to choose from, the most impressively simple that I came across was Soundslides. Soundslides is a cross-platform (Mac / Windows) "rapid production tool for still image and audio Web presentations" -- built for journalists, this is probably the most intuitive tool that I've ever seen for creating stunning audio-visual slideshows. (I won't bore you with the results... but, as an example of how easy it is to use, I was up-and-running with a nifty narrated slideshow in under 10 minutes.)

As writers, editors, and publishers, you already know how to tell a story: now it's time to just get out there and do it online.